Making designs is a major activity in the play regime as well as in the education of children. One class of design-making toy involves producing designs on paper by means of pens or paint. There are a number of such design-making toys on the market which help children produce pleasant designs. For example, Binney and Smith (Easton, Pa.) and AMAV Industries (Montreal, Canada) market stencils that can be used to guide a pen or pencil in drawing predetermined designs. The well-known toy sold under the trademark SPIROGRAPH.RTM. by Kenner Products (Cincinnati, Ohio) allows a wide range of predetermined designs to be produced.
A number of companies (Ohio Art, Bryan, Ohio; Nasta Industries, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Natural Science Ind., Ltd., Rockaway, N. Y.) manufacture a design-producing toy in which pain is dropped or poured onto a rotating surface. The wet paint spreads out radially on the surface due to centrifugal force and produces a radially-based design on the surface. With these instruments the user has little or no control over the nature of the design once the paint is dropped onto the surface. In the instrument of the present invention the pen can be removed from the surface of the paper by the user and repositioned on the surface at different radial distances to produce circularly-based designs. Also, the designs produced with the current commercial instruments based on centrifugal spreading of paint are not influenced by the nature of the underlying surface, and the manufacturers of these instruments generally supply stiff cardboard sheets rather than flexible paper sheets for producing the designs upon. With the present invention many styles of designs are possible based on the nature of the template that underlies the paper. With the present invention different designs can be produced from clockwise and counterclockwise rotation of the paper, a feature that is different from the instruments based on the centrifugal spreading of paint.
Methods for transferring images from templates to a sheet of overlying paper are already known in the prior art. For example, if a sheet of paper is placed on top of a coin and if the paper is then rubbed with a pencil, an image of the design on the coin is transferred to the paper. Toys based on this principle and using plastic templates with designs of monsters or girls' fashions have previously been marketed by Tomy Corporation (Carson, Calif.). With these commercial products, the template and paper are maintained stationary while a pencil or crayon is rubbed on the paper to produce a design. In these cases the designs produced are not circularly-based. With the present invention, the repetitive rubbing action is avoided because the paper is rotating; all that is required is that the user gently apply the pen to the surface of the rotating paper and change the radial position of the pen in a single sweep in order to "fill in" the design.
The instrument of the present invention provides a means for producing novel types of colorful designs rapidly and simply, by applying pens to rotating paper or other material. The nature of the designs produced depends on the angular velocity of the rotating paper, the speed of radial movement of the pen, on whether the paper is rotated clockwise or counterclockwise (or both), and on the nature or the surface immediately underlying the paper, as well as on other factors. The instrument of the present invention is neat and clean to use, unlike some toys that involve centrifugal spreading of paint where the paint splatters on the walls of the instrument requiring a clean-up after using the device.